One Sabbath afternoon in seventh grade at Pacific Union College in Angwin, CA, 94508, I’m hanging out with two male classmates Cary and Kevin. They call this girl in our class who I like, Denise, the most beautiful girl in the class, and they ask her who she likes. When she doesn’t answer, they start throwing names at her. One name is mine. I hear them pause on the line and they follow-up. “So you like Luke?” I’m thrilled. When Kevin and Cary get off the phone, I make them tell me everything.
Apparently, Denise likes three guys and I am one. I’m thrilled. I’m excited. I can’t believe I have a chance with this beauty. So I start calling her up every afternoon after school and asking her if she’s made up her mind who she likes. I’ve never called a girl before so this is awesome. I feel like I big shot, a sophisticate with the ladies.
After a couple of weeks, Denise complains to her friends about my calls and word gets back to me and I feel humiliated. I had a chance with this girl but once I started calling her, she lost all interest in me.
A friend tells me to play on her guilt, so I call her that day and say I’m sorry for bothering her and I hang up. She calls me back and say it’s ok. I didn’t bother her.
Pfft. Whatever. I killed any attraction she had for me.
One day on the playground, Cary gets mad at Denise, and yells at me, “You can have her.” As though I have a chance anymore.
A few months later, Denise and I race to the drinking fountain and I beat her and so she punches me in the eye and gets her drink first and I go around for the next day with one eye closed to dramatize how badly I’ve been hurt but once she apologizes to me, I let it go back to normal.
In eighth grade, my class goes on this 20 mile class bike ride. I’m biking along beside Denise having a great time talking to her. I notice how hard she pushes up the hill but with effort, I keep up with her. I’m not reading her signals. At a rest stop, she complains to friends and word gets back to me and I leave her alone for the rest of the trip.
In the summer before 11th grade, I start asking Denise out. It seems she always has something going, usually a horse show that she must attend, but when the baseball season resumes after the 1982 strike, I have tickets to the first game and she agrees to come along with a group of us. It’s my first date. A group of us are riding along in the back of the Toyota pick-up and playing card games and my best friend Andy’s little sister Jenny Muth-vonBlankenburg says, “Luke, you’re wearing mismatched socks.”
True.
At the San Francisco Giants stadium, I race ahead of my date to try to find our seats and then during the game, I spend much of the time making bets with Andy. Denise is not impressed and she complains about my oafish behavior. There’s no second date.
I haven’t seen Denise since June of 1984, when we graduated high school. My last strong memory is her leaping with joy into the air and out of the PUC pool that summer and she smiles and flings her hands about in pure abandon and I see in an instant that she is not perfection any more, that she does not have the greatest body, that my dream girl is chunky, that everything isn’t distributed right, there aren’t enough curves and there’s too much in the middle, and I see that life will be hard on her too.
